Mad Art Gallery proudly presents It Came From Milwaukee, a traveling exhibit featuring work by Amy O'Neill, Andrea Picard, Bridget Griffith Evans, Dwellephant, Eduardo J. Villanueva, Eugene Duane, Jeff Sadowski, Jeremy Wolf, John Scotello, Luckystar Studio®, Soar Studios, and Von Munz. Don't miss the opportunity to see the work of these artists as they pass through St. Louis.
This exhibit opens on Friday, June 5, 2009, and continues through June 29, 2009. There is a free opening reception on Friday, June 5, 2009, from 7:00 p.m. until 11:00 p.m.
Amy O'Neill is a Milwaukee-born, Boston-based artist. A fine arts painter with a sizable drawing and printmaking habit, her activities include painting, not having leukemia, and playing the banjo. She is interested in pirates, making things, palindromes, mix tapes, various forms of communication, hand tools, and lists.
Andrea Picard is a spunky Midwest girl from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After earning a bachelor of fine arts degree from The Maryland Institute College of Art in 1994, she relocated to Chicago, Illinois, where she currently resides and has lived for the past thirteen years. After receiving her Masters degree in Counseling Art Therapy in 2006 from The Adler School of Professional Psychology, Andrea meshed the two art worlds into one. In addition, currently works as an Art Therapist in Chicago. An enthusiasm for collecting and a love for animals, food, and humor inspire her oil paintings and mixed media projects. As an innovative and resourceful artist, Andrea utilizes her knack for finding a use for discarded books, fabrics, old papers, mundane and quirky images and transforms the items into rich textured mixed media paintings. Her love for oil painting is also abundant and shines through in works rendered from life and photographs. Her most recent series, Portraits: Imaginary Friends, is comprised of stretched fabric and sewn paper on oil painted hamster critters and lush ravens.
Bridget Griffith Evans holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and is a founding member of Luckystar Studio®. Influenced by the Bay area painters, such as Richard Diebenkorn, David Park and Wayne Thiebaud, and the colors of Pop Art, her work is based on the concept of memory and capturing a moment in time. Bridget has exhibited and sold internationally.
The artist known "Dwellephant" is actually Milan Zori and hails from a small town in Ohio. Dwellephant does illustration, painting, and design and has recently released the book Missing the Boat.
Eduardo Villanueva is an artist living and working in Milwaukee. His work tackles the deeply personal conflicts of life, death, love, loss, and spirituality. Using a complex language of symbols intertwining with idealized human and animal figures, Eduardo creates images that tell classic tales of these eternal struggles. A painter by nature, Eduardo has recently been exploring the challenges of mural art. The scale of his mural work lends itself well to the artist's subject matter.
Gene Evans is a self taught artist and musician originally from Baltimore, the co-owner of Luckystar Studio, and organizer of the It Came From Milwaukee exhibit. Gene has worked as a freelance graphic designer, has sold and exhibited around the world, and holds a degree in Mixology from the Bartenders School of Baltimore-Washington.
Gene hopes you've had as much fun reading this as he had writing it.
In pursuit of artistic excellence and new experiences to feed his creativity, Jeff Sadowski Wisconsin for the Bay Area in 1982. In California he soaked up the culture and had the pleasure to work with some of the best known artists in the psychedelic and lowbrow art world. Some of these influences make their way into his own work today. It was in California that Jeff mastered the airbrush and developed his own unique painting style. Acrylics are his chosen medium, but his use of deep rich colors gives his paintings the appearance of oils. Jeff has exhibited in galleries in California, Illinois, and Wisconsin. He has done numerous album covers and has been published in two editions of Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art. One of his paintings has been shown in the Charles Allis Museum in Milwaukee. Regardless of the style-whimsical, psychedelic, surreal, or lowbrow, always unique Jeff Sadowski is in a world all his own.
John Scotello regularly exhibits in Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, St. Petersburg, Seattle, and throughout Wisconsin. He tours nationally as a stand up comedian and regularly performs improv comedy at Comedy Sportz in Milwaukee. His critical essays, writings, graphic design, and illustrations have been published world wide and distributed in the millions. John is the only male to ever receive the Walter's Fellowship for Art History at UW-Milwaukee's Graduate School of Art History.
For nearly a decade the artists of Luckystar Studio®, Gene Evans and Bridget Griffith Evans, have been collaborating creating dynamic work based on the idea of Warhol's factory. Evans and Griffith have left no stone unturned: curating record breaking exhibits, running their own award winning gallery, and sponsoring their own traveling exhibits to bring the art to patrons across the country. Hundreds of collectors around the world have discovered everyone deserves a little Luckystar Studio® in their life.
David and Jon Jenson make up Soar Studios. The brothers are actively involved in the creative process and work in several different mediums. Combining skills of engineering, computer programming, woodworking, screen printing, illustration, photography, and more, Soar is able to take diverse approaches with any project they dream. Their goal is to maximize freedom by exploring without limitations.
Inspired by the underground rock slogan, "What are you doing to participate?", Von Munz spent the past decade silkscreening concert posters for bands that perform in Milwaukee's smaller venues. Unaided by a computer, he relies on solid drawings and a sharp X-Acto blade to create his unique brand of serigraphs. Branching out into fine art, Von Munz has participated in numerous Milwaukee Art Museum's one-night only exhibits dating back to the "Factory Soiree" in 1999, and including the current Cedar Block shows in which artists follow guidelines to create art relating to the Museum's main attractions, such as Bruce Nauman, Francis Bacon, and even trying his hand at photography for the Saul Leitner exhibit. His concert posters have gained a rabid following in Milwaukee and have gone to collectors worldwide. Von Munz has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Toronto. He had the distinction of creating the first silkscreen concert poster for the White Stripes when they opened for Milwaukee's garage-rock heroes, the Mistreaters in 1999. He also created the White Stripes' first headlining silkscreen poster when they returned to the Cactus Club in 2000.
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